At times it becomes necessary for a nation to
defend itself through force of arms. Because war is a grave matter, involving the
sacrifice and taking of precious human life, conscience demands that those who would wage
the war state clearly the moral reasoning behind their actions, in order to make plain to
one another, and to the world community, the principles they are defending.

We affirm five
fundamental truths that pertain to all people without distinction:

1.All human
beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

2.The basic
subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is to
protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing.

4.Freedom of
conscience and religious freedom are inviolable rights of the human person.

5.Killing in
the name of God is contrary to faith in God and is the greatest betrayal of the
universality of religious faith.

We fight to
defend ourselves and to defend these universal principles.

What are American
Values?

Since
September 11, millions of
Americans have asked themselves and one another, why? Why are we the targets of these
hateful attacks? Why do those who would kill us, want to kill us?

We recognize
that at times our nation has acted with arrogance and ignorance toward other societies. At
times our nation has pursued misguided and unjust policies. Too often we as a nation have
failed to live up to our ideals. We cannot urge other societies to abide by moral
principles without simultaneously admitting our own societys failure at times to
abide by those same principles. We are united in our conviction  and are confident
that all people of good will in the world will agree  that no appeal to the merits
or demerits of specific foreign policies can ever justify, or even purport to make sense
of, the mass slaughter of innocent persons.

Moreover, in a
democracy such as ours, in which government derives its power from the consent of the
governed, policy stems at least partly from culture, from the values and priorities of the
society as a whole. Though we do not claim to possess full knowledge of the motivations of
our attackers and their sympathizers, what we do know suggests that their grievances
extend far beyond any one policy, or set of policies. After all, the killers of September
11 issued no particular demands; in this sense, at least, the killing was done for its own
sake. The leader of Al Qaeda described the blessed strikes of September 11 as
blows against America, the head of world infidelity. Clearly, then, our
attackers despise not just our government, but our overall society, our entire way of
living. Fundamentally, their grievance concerns not only what our leaders do, but also who
we are.

So who are
we?What do we value? For many people,
including many Americans and a number of signatories to this letter, some values sometimes
seen in America are unattractive and harmful. Consumerism as a way of life. The notion of
freedom as no rules. The notion of the individual as self-made and utterly sovereign,
owing little to others or to society. The weakening of marriage and family life. Plus an
enormous entertainment and communications apparatus that relentlessly glorifies such ideas
and beams them, whether they are welcome or not, into nearly every corner of the globe.

One major task
facing us as Americans, important prior to September 11, is facing honestly these
unattractive aspects of our society and doing all we can to change them for the better. We
pledge ourselves to this effort.

At the same
time, other American values  what we view as our founding ideals, and those that
most define our way of life  are quite different from these, and they are much more
attractive, not only to Americans, but to people everywhere in the world. Let us briefly
mention four of them.

The first is
the conviction that all persons possess innate human dignity as a birthright, and that
consequently each person must always be treated as an end rather than used as a means. The
founders of the United States, drawing upon the natural law tradition as well as upon the
fundamental religious claim that all persons are created in the image of God, affirmed as
self-evident the idea that all persons possess equal dignity. The clearest
political expression of a belief in transcendent human dignity is democracy. In the United
States in recent generations, among the clearest cultural expressions of this idea has
been the affirmation of the equal dignity of men and women, and of all persons regardless
of race or color.

Second, and
following closely from the first, is the conviction that universal moral truths (what our
nations founders called laws of Nature and of Natures God) exist
and are accessible to all people. Some of the most eloquent expressions of our reliance
upon these truths are found in our Declaration of Independence, George
Washingtons Farewell Address, Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg
Address and Second
Inaugural Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s Letter from the
Birmingham Jail.

The third is
the conviction that, because our individual and collective access to truth is imperfect,
most disagreements about values call for civility, openness to other views, and reasonable
argument in pursuit of truth.

The fourth is
freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. These intrinsically connected freedoms are
widely recognized, in our own country and elsewhere, as a reflection of basic human
dignity and as a precondition for other individual freedoms.

To us, what is
most striking about these values is that they apply to all persons without distinction,
and cannot be used to exclude anyone from recognition and respect based on the
particularities of race, language, memory, or religion. Thats why anyone, in
principle, can become an American. And in fact, anyone does. People from everywhere in the
world come to our country with what a statue in New Yorks harbor calls a yearning to
breathe free, and soon enough, they are Americans. Historically, no other nation has
forged its core identity  its constitution and other founding documents, as well as
its basic self-understanding  so directly and explicitly on the basis of universal
human values. To us, no other fact about this country is more important.

Some people
assert that these values are not universal at all, but instead derive particularly from
western, largely Christian civilization. They argue that to conceive of these values as
universal is to deny the distinctiveness of other cultures. We disagree. We recognize our
own civilizations achievements, but we believe that all people are created equal. We
believe in the universal possibility and desirability of human freedom. We believe that
certain basic moral truths are recognizable everywhere in the world. We agree with the
international group of distinguished philosophers who in the late 1940s helped to shape
the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and who concluded that a few
fundamental moral ideas are so widespread that they may be viewed as implicit in
mans nature as a member of society. In hope, and on the evidence, we agree
with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends
toward justice, not just for the few, or the lucky, but for all people.

Looking at our
own society, we acknowledge again the all too frequent gaps between our ideals and our
conduct. But as Americans in a time of war and global crisis, we are also suggesting that
the best of what we too casually call American values do not belong
only to America, but are in fact the shared inheritance of humankind, and therefore a
possible basis of hope for a world community based on peace and justice.

What about God?

Since
September 11, millions of
Americans have asked themselves and one another, what about God? Crises of this magnitude
force us to think anew about first principles. When we contemplate the horror of what has
occurred, and the danger of what is likely to come, many of us ask: Is religious faith
part of the solution or part of the problem?

The
signatories to this letter come from diverse religious and moral traditions, including
secular traditions. We are united in our belief that invoking Gods authority to kill
or maim human beings is immoral and is contrary to faith in God. Many of us believe that
we are under Gods judgment. None of us believe that God ever instructs some of us to
kill or conquer others of us. Indeed, such an attitude, whether it is called holy
war or crusade, not only violates basic principles of justice, but is in
fact a negation of religious faith, since it turns God into an idol to be used for
mans own purposes. Our own nation was once engaged in a great civil war, in which
each side presumed Gods aid against the other. In his Second Inaugural Address
in 1865, the tenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, put it simply:
The Almighty has his own purposes.

Those who
attacked us on September 11 openly proclaim that they are engaged in holy war. Many who
support or sympathize with the attackers also invoke Gods name and seem to embrace
the rationale of holy war. But to recognize the disaster of this way of thinking, we as
Americans need only to remember our own, and western, history. Christian religious wars
and Christian sectarian violence tore apart Europe for the better part of a century. In
the United States, we are no strangers to those who would murder at least in part in the
name of their religious faith. When it comes to this particular evil, no civilization is
spotless and no religious tradition is spotless.

The human
person has a basic drive to question in order to know. Evaluating, choosing, and having
reasons for what we value and love are characteristically human activities. Part of this
intrinsic desire to know concerns why we are born and what will happen when we die, which
leads us to seek the truth about ultimate ends, including, for many people, the question
of God. Some of the signatories to this letter believe that human beings are by nature
religious in the sense that everyone, including those who do not believe in
God and do not participate in organized religion, makes choices about what is important
and reflects on ultimate values. All of the signatories to this letter recognize that,
across the world, religious faith and religious institutions are important bases of civil
society, often producing results for society that are beneficial and healing, at times
producing results that are divisive and violent.

So how can
governments and societal leaders best respond to these fundamental human and social
realities? One response is to outlaw or repress religion. Another possible response is to
embrace an ideological secularism: a strong societal skepticism or hostility regarding
religion, based on the premise that religion itself, and especially any public
expression of religious conviction, is inherently problematic. A third possible response
is to embrace theocracy: the belief that one religion, presumably the one true
religion, should be effectively mandatory for all members of society and therefore should
receive complete or significant state sponsorship and support.

We disagree
with each of these responses. Legal repression radically violates civil and religious
freedom and is incompatible with democratic civil society. Although ideological secularism
may have increased in our society in recent generations, we disagree with it because it
would deny the public legitimacy of an important part of civil society as well as seek to
suppress or deny the existence of what is at least arguably an important dimension of
personhood itself. Although theocracy has been present in western (though not U.S.)
history, we disagree with it for both social and theological reasons. Socially,
governmental establishment of a particular religion can conflict with the principle of
religious freedom, a fundamental human right. In addition, government control of religion
can cause or exacerbate religious conflicts and, perhaps even more importantly, can
threaten the vitality and authenticity of religious institutions. Theologically, even for
those who are firmly convinced of the truth of their faith, the coercion of others in
matters of religious conscience is ultimately a violation of religion itself, since it
robs those other persons of the right to respond freely and in dignity to the
Creators invitation.

At its best,
the United States seeks to be a society in which faith and freedom can go together, each
elevating the other. We have a secular state  our government officials are not
simultaneously religious officials  but we are by far the western worlds most
religious society. We are a nation that deeply respects religious freedom and diversity,
including the rights of nonbelievers, but one whose citizens recite a Pledge of Allegiance
to one nation, under God, and one that proclaims in many of its courtrooms and
inscribes on each of its coins the motto, In God We Trust. Politically, our
separation of church and state seeks to keep politics within its proper sphere, in part by
limiting the states power to control religion, and in part by causing government
itself to draw legitimacy from, and operate under, a larger moral canopy that is not of
its own making. Spiritually, our separation of church and state permits religion to be
religion, by detaching it from the coercive power of government. In short, we seek to
separate church and state for the protection and proper vitality of both.

For Americans
of religious faith, the challenge of embracing religious truth and religious
freedom has often been difficult. The matter, moreover, is never settled. Ours is a social
and constitutional arrangement that almost by definition requires constant deliberation,
debate, adjustment, and compromise. It is also helped by, and helps to produce, a certain
character or temperament, such that religious believers who strongly embrace the truth of
their faith also, not as a compromise with that truth but as an aspect of it, respect
those who take a different path.

What will help
to reduce religiously based mistrust, hatred, and violence in the 21st century? There are
many important answers to this question, of course, but here, we hope, is one: Deepening
and renewing our appreciation of religion by recognizing religious freedom as a
fundamental right of all people in every nation.

A Just War?

We
recognize that all war is
terrible, representative finally of human political failure. We also know that the line
separating good and evil does not run between one society and another, much less between
one religion and another; ultimately, that line runs through the middle of every human
heart. Finally, those of us  Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others  who are
people of faith recognize our responsibility, stated in our holy scriptures, to love mercy
and to do all in our power to prevent war and live in peace.

Yet reason and
careful moral reflection also teach us that there are times when the first and most
important reply to evil is to stop it. There are times when waging war is not only morally
permitted, but morally necessary, as a response to calamitous acts of violence, hatred,
and injustice. This is one of those times.

The idea of a
just war is broadly based, with roots in many of the worlds diverse
religious and secular moral traditions. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teachings, for
example, all contain serious reflections on the definition of a just war. To be sure, some
people, often in the name of realism, insist that war is essentially a realm of
self-interest and necessity, making most attempts at moral analysis irrelevant. We
disagree. Moral inarticulacy in the face of war is itself a moral stance  one that
rejects the possibility of reason, accepts normlessness in international affairs, and
capitulates to cynicism. To seek to apply objective moral reasoning to war is to defend
the possibility of civil society and a world community based on justice.

The principles
of just war teach us that wars of aggression and aggrandizement are never acceptable. Wars
may not legitimately be fought for national glory, to avenge past wrongs, for territorial
gain, or for any other non-defensive purpose.

The primary
moral justification for war is to protect the innocent from certain harm. Augustine, whose
early 5th century book, The City of God, is a seminal contribution to just war
thinking, argues (echoing Socrates) that it is better for the Christian as an individual
to suffer harm rather than to commit it. But is the morally responsible person also
required, or even permitted, to make for other innocent persons a commitment to
non-self-defense? For Augustine, and for the broader just war tradition, the answer is no.
If one has compelling evidence that innocent people who are in no position to protect
themselves will be grievously harmed unless coercive force is used to stop an aggressor,
then the moral principle of love of neighbor calls us to the use of force.

Wars may not
legitimately be fought against dangers that are small, questionable, or of uncertain
consequence, or against dangers that might plausibly be mitigated solely through
negotiation, appeals to reason, persuasion from third parties, or other non-violent means.
But if the danger to innocent life is real and certain, and especially if the aggressor is
motivated by implacable hostility  if the end he seeks is not your willingness to
negotiate or comply, but rather your destruction  then a resort to proportionate
force is morally justified.

A just war can
only be fought by a legitimate authority with responsibility for public order. Violence
that is free-lance, opportunistic, or individualistic is never morally acceptable.

A just war can
only be waged against persons who are combatants. Just war authorities from across history
and around the world  whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, from other faith
traditions, or secular  consistently teach us that noncombatants are immune from
deliberate attack. Thus, killing civilians for revenge, or even as a means of deterring
aggression from people who sympathize with them, is morally wrong. Although in some
circumstances, and within strict limits, it can be morally justifiable to undertake
military actions that may result in the unintended but foreseeable death or injury of some
noncombatants, it is not morally acceptable to make the killing of noncombatants the
operational objective of a military action.

These and
other just war principles teach us that, whenever human beings contemplate or wage war, it
is both possible and necessary to affirm the sanctity of human life and embrace the
principle of equal human dignity. These principles strive to preserve and reflect, even in
the tragic activity of war, the fundamental moral truth that others 
those who are strangers to us, those who differ from us in race or language, those whose
religions we may believe to be untrue  have the same right to life that we do, and
the same human dignity and human rights that we do.

On
September 11, 2001, a
group of individuals deliberately attacked the United States, using hijacked airplanes as
weapons with which to kill in less than two hours over 3,000 of our citizens in New York
City, southwestern Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Overwhelmingly, those who died on
September 11 were civilians, not combatants, and were not known at all, except as
Americans, by those who killed them. Those who died on the morning of September 11 were
killed unlawfully, wantonly, and with premeditated malice  a kind of killing that,
in the name of precision, can only be described as murder. Those murdered included people
from all races, many ethnicities, most major religions. They included dishwashers and
corporate executives.

The
individuals who committed these acts of war did not act alone, or without support, or for
unknown reasons. They were members of an international Islamicist network, active in as
many as 40 countries, now known to the world as Al Qaeda. This group, in turn, constitutes
but one arm of a larger radical Islamicist movement, growing for decades and in some
instances tolerated and even supported by governments, that openly professes its desire
and increasingly demonstrates its ability to use murder to advance its objectives.

We use the
terms Islam and Islamic to refer to one of the worlds great
religions, with about 1.2 billion adherents, including several million U.S. citizens, some
of whom were murdered on September 11. It ought to go without saying  but we say it
here once, clearly  that the great majority of the worlds Muslims, guided in
large measure by the teachings of the Quran, are decent, faithful, and peaceful. We
use the terms Islamicism and radical Islamicist to refer to the
violent, extremist, and radically intolerant religious-political movement that now
threatens the world, including the Muslim world.

This radical,
violent movement opposes not only certain U.S. and western policies  some
signatories to this letter also oppose some of those policies  but also a
foundational principle of the modern world, religious tolerance, as well as those
fundamental human rights, in particular freedom of conscience and religion, that are
enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that must be
the basis of any civilization oriented to human flourishing, justice, and peace.

This extremist
movement claims to speak for Islam, but betrays fundamental Islamic principles. Islam sets
its face against moral atrocities. For example, reflecting the teaching of the
Quran and the example of the Prophet, Muslim scholars through the centuries have
taught that struggle in the path of God (i.e., jihad) forbids the deliberate
killing of noncombatants, and requires that military action be undertaken only at the
behest of legitimate public authorities. They remind us forcefully that Islam, no less
than Christianity, Judaism and other religions, is threatened and potentially degraded by
these profaners who invoke Gods name to kill indiscriminately.

We recognize
that movements claiming the mantle of religion also have complex political, social, and
demographic dimensions, to which due attention must be paid. At the same time, philosophy
matters, and the animating philosophy of this radical Islamicist movement, in its contempt
for human life, and by viewing the world as a life-and-death struggle between believers
and unbelievers (whether non-radical Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, or others),
clearly denies the equal dignity of all persons and, in doing so, betrays religion and
rejects the very foundation of civilized life and the possibility of peace among nations.

Most seriously
of all, the mass murders of September 11 demonstrated, arguably for the first time, that
this movement now possesses not only the openly stated desire, but also the capacity and
expertise  including possible access to, and willingness to use, chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons  to wreak massive, horrific devastation on its
intended targets.

Those who
slaughtered more than 3,000 persons on September 11 and who, by their own admission, want
nothing more than to do it again, constitute a clear and present danger to all people of
good will everywhere in the world, not just the United States. Such acts are a pure
example of naked aggression against innocent human life, a world-threatening evil that
clearly requires the use of force to remove it.

Organized
killers with global reach now threaten all of us. In the name of universal human morality,
and fully conscious of the restrictions and requirements of a just war, we support our
governments, and our societys, decision to use force of arms against them.

Conclusion

We pledge
to do all we can to guard
against the harmful temptations  especially those of arrogance and jingoism 
to which nations at war so often seem to yield. At the same time, with one voice we say
solemnly that it is crucial for our nation and its allies to win this war. We fight to
defend ourselves, but we also believe that we fight to defend those universal principles
of human rights and human dignity that are the best hope for humankind.

One day, this
war will end. When it does  and in some respects even before it ends  the
great task of conciliation awaits us. We hope that this war, by stopping an unmitigated
global evil, can increase the possibility of a world community based on justice. But we
know that only the peacemakers among us in every society can ensure that this war will not
have been in vain.

We wish
especially to reach out to our brothers and sisters in Muslim societies. We say to you
forthrightly: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. We have so much in
common. There is so much that we must do together. Your human dignity, no less than ours
 your rights and opportunities for a good life, no less than ours  are what we
believe were fighting for. We know that, for some of you, mistrust of us is high,
and we know that we Americans are partly responsible for that mistrust. But we must not be
enemies. In hope, we wish to join with you and all people of good will to build a just and
lasting peace.

Killing in the name of God:
Bosphorus Declaration (Istanbul, Turkey, February 9, 1994); Berne Declaration
(Wolfsberg/Zurich, Switzerland, November 26, 1992); and John Paul II, Papal Message for
World Day of Peace, Articles 6-7 (Vatican City, January 1, 2002).

briefly mention four of them: See A
Call to Civil Society (New York: Institute for American Values, 1998).

widely recognized...as a precondition
for other individual freedoms: See John Witte Jr. and M. Christian Green, The
American Constitutional Experiment in Religious Human Rights: The Perennial Search for
Principles, in Johan D. van der Vyver and John Witte, Jr. (eds.), Religious Human
Rights in Global Perspective, vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996).
See also Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights:
Four Inquiries (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998).

deny the distinctiveness of other
cultures: Some people make this point as a way of condemning those other
cultures that are presumably too inferior, or too enthralled by false beliefs, to
appreciate what we in this letter are calling universal human values; others make this
point as a way of endorsing (usually one of) those cultures that are presumably
indifferent to these values. We disagree with both versions of this point.

implicit in mans nature as a
member of society:
Richard McKeon, The Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances of the Rights of
Man, in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations
(London: Wingate, 1949), 45.

arch of the moral universe is long, but
it bends toward justice: Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From
Here?, in James M. Washington (ed.), The Essential Writings and Speeches of
Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 245.

What about God?

an idol to be used for mans own
purposes: John Paul
II, Papal Message for World Day of Peace, Article 6 (Vatican City, January 1, 2002).

no religious tradition is spotless:
Intra-Christian examples of holy war or crusade emerged with particular force in Europe
during the 17th century. According to some scholars, the principle characteristics of holy
war are: that the cause for which the war is fought has a clear connection to religion
(i.e., that the cause is holy); that the war is fought under the banner and
with the presumption of divine authority and assistance (the Latin term used by 11th
century Christian crusaders was DeusVolt, or God wills
it); that the warriors understand themselves to be godly, or warrior
saints; that the war is prosecuted zealously and unsparingly, since the enemy is
presumed to be ungodly and therefore fundamentally other, lacking the human
dignity and rights of the godly; and finally, that warriors who die in battle are favored
by God as martyrs. Eventually, in Christianity, the development of just war doctrine, with
its emphasis on moral universalism, largely called for the elimination of religion as a
just cause for war. As early as the 16th century, some natural law theorists such as
Franciscus de Victoria and Francisco Suarez were explicitly condemning the use of war to
spread religion. Difference in religion, Victoria wrote, is not a cause
of just war. See James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of
War: Religious and Secular Concepts 1200 - 1740 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975), 112-123, 154. See also Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War
and Peace: A HistoricalSurvey and
Critical Re-evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960), 148.

embrace an ideological secularism:
We
wish here to distinguish secular from secularism. Secular, derived
from the Latin term meaning world and suggesting in the world,
refers merely to functions that are separate from the church. Secularism, by contrast, is
a philosophy, an ism, a way of seeing the world based on rejection of religion
or hostility to religion.

an important dimension of personhood
itself: For this
reason, advocates of secularism may underestimate the degree to which human societies,
even in theory, can simply dispense with religion. Moreover, they almost
certainly miscalculate, even accepting many of their own premises, the social consequences
of suppressing traditional religion. For if we understand religion to be values of
ultimate concern, the 20th century saw two world-threatening examples  Nazism in
Germany, and communism in the Soviet Union  of the emergence of secular religions,
or what might be called replacement religions, each violently intent on eliminating its
societys traditional religious faiths (in effect, its competitor faiths), and each,
when in power, ruthlessly indifferent to human dignity and basic human rights.

separate church and state for the
protection and proper vitality of both: As the leaders and scholars who produced The
Williamsburg Charter put it in 1988, the government acts as a safeguard, but not
the source, of freedom for faiths, whereas the churches and synagogues act as a source,
but not the safeguard, of faiths for freedom . . . The result is neither a naked public
square where all religion is excluded, nor a sacred public square with any religion
established or semi-established. The result, rather, is a civil public square in which
citizens of all religious faiths, or none, engage one another in the continuing democratic
discourse.

See James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness
(eds.), Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty Clauses and the
American Public Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990), 140.

moral canopy that is not of its own
making: A Call to Civil Society (New York: Institute for American Values, 1998): 13. A Just War?

middle of every human heart:
see
Alexander Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I (New York: Harper and Row,
1974), 168.

diverse religious and secular moral
traditions: See Jean
Bethke Elshtain (ed.), Just War Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Elshtain,
Stanley Hauerwas, and James Turner Johnson, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
Conference on Just War Tradition and the New War on Terrorism (http://pewforum.org/events/1005/);
James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and
Secular Concepts 1200 - 1740 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Johnson, Just
War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981); Johnson, The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions
in Western Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Johnson, Morality
and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Johnson and John
Kelsay (eds.), Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in
Western and Islamic Tradition (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Majid Khadduri, War
and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955); John
Kelsay and James Turner Johnson (eds.), Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical
Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Tradition (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1991); Terry Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular
Perspectives (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); William V. OBrien, The Conduct of War and
Limited War (New York:
Praeger, 1981); Rudolf Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton:
Markus Wiener, 1996); Paul Ramsey, Speak Up for Just War or Pacifism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1988); Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977); and
Richard Wasserstrom (ed.), War and Morality (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970).

attempts at moral analysis irrelevant:
The Latin axiom is: Inter arma silent leges (In times of war the law is silent).
Classical exemplars of this perspective include Thucydides, Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas
Hobbes; for a more recent treatment, see Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978). For a sensitive but critical survey of the contribution
of this school of thought to international theory, see Jack Donnelly, Realism and
International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

We disagree: Intellectual and moral
approaches to war as a human phenomenon can generally be divided into four schools of
thought. The first can be called realism: the belief that war is basically a matter of
power, self-interest, necessity, and survival, thereby rendering abstract moral analysis
largely beside the point. The second can be called holy war: the belief that God can
authorize the coercion and killing of nonbelievers, or that a particular secular ideology
of ultimate concern can authorize the coercion and killing of nonbelievers. The third can
be called pacifism: the belief that all war is intrinsically immoral. And the fourth is
typically called just war: the belief that universal moral reasoning, or what some would
call natural moral law, can and should be applied to the activity of war. The signatories
to this letter largely disagree with the first school of thought. We unequivocally reject
the second school of thought, regardless of the form it takes, or whether it springs from
and purports to support our own society (our side) or the side of those who
wish us ill. Some of the signatories have much respect for the third school of thought
(particularly its insistence that non-violence does not mean retreat or passivity or
declining to stand for justice; quite the opposite), even as we respectfully, and with
some degree of fear and trembling, differ from it. As a group we seek largely to embrace
and build upon the fourth school of thought.

(echoing Socrates): Socrates
judgment that it is better to suffer evil rather than to do it is conveyed to us by Plato
in the Apology
(32-c to 32-e) and constitutes a key moment in moral philosophy.

might plausibly be mitigated solely
through...non-violent means: Some people suggest that the last resort
requirement of just war theory  in essence, the requirement to explore all other
reasonable and plausible alternatives to the use of force  is not satisfied until
the resort to arms has been approved by a recognized international body, such as the
United Nations. This proposition is problematic. First, it is novel; historically,
approval by an international body has not been viewed by just war theorists as a just
cause requirement. Second, it is quite debatable whether an international body such as the
U.N. is in a position to be the best final judge of when, and under what conditions, a
particular resort to arms is justified; or whether the attempt by that body to make and
enforce such judgments would inevitably compromise its primary mission of humanitarian
work. According to one observer, a former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General, transforming
the U.N. into a pale imitation of a state in order to manage the use of
force internationally may well be a suicidal embrace. See Giandomenico
Picco, The U.N. and the Use of Force, Foreign Affairs 73 (1994): 15.
See also Thomas G. Weis, David P. Forsythe, and Roger A. Coate, United Nations and
Changing World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 104-106; and John Gerard
Ruggie, The United Nations and the Collective Use of Force: Whither? Or Whether?
(New York: United Nations Association of the USA, 1996).

Violence that is free-lance...is never
morally acceptable: In just war theory, the main goal of the legitimate authority
requirement is to prevent the anarchy of private warfare and warlords  an anarchy
that exists today in some parts of the world, and of which the attackers of September 11
are representative embodiments. The legitimate authority requirement does not, on the
other hand, for several reasons, apply clearly or directly to wars of national
independence or succession. First, these latter types of conflict occur within a state,
not internationally. Moreover, in many such conflicts, the question of public legitimacy
is exactly what is being contested. For example, in the war for independence that resulted
in the founding of the United States, just war analysts frequently point out that the
rebelling colonies themselves constituted a legitimate public authority, and further that
the colonies had reasonably concluded that the British government had, in the words of our
Declaration of Independence, become destructive of these ends of legitimate
government, and therefore itself had ceased to function as a competent public authority.
Indeed, even in cases in which those waging war do not in any plain sense constitute a
currently functioning public authority  for example, the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising of Polish Jews in 1943 against the Nazi occupation  the legitimate
authority requirement of just war theory does not morally invalidate the resort to arms by
those resisting oppression by seeking to overthrow illegitimate authority.

other just war principles:
For
example, just war principles often insist that legitimate warfare must be motivated by the
intention of enhancing the likelihood of peace and reducing the likelihood of violence and
destruction; that it must be proportionate, such that the social goods that would result
from victory in war discernably outweigh the evils that will attend the war; that it must
contain the probability of success, such that lives are not taken and sacrificed in futile
causes; and that it must pass the test of comparative justice, such that the human goods
being defended are important enough, and gravely enough in danger, to outweigh what many
just war theorists view as the standing moral presumption against war. This letter focuses
largely on principles of justice in declaring war (in the terminology employed by many
Christian just war thinkers, jus ad bellum) and in waging war (jus in bello).
Other principles focus on justice in settling the war and restoring conditions of peace (jus
post bellum). See Jean Bethke Elshtain (ed.), Just War Theory (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992); U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace:
Gods Promise and Our Response (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic
Conference, 1983); and other sources cited above.

over 3,000 of our citizens: As of
January 4, 2002, official estimates were that 3,119 persons had been killed by the
September 11 attackers, including 2,895 in New York, 184 in Washington, and 40 in
Pennsylvania. Although this letter refers to our citizens, included among
those murdered on September 11 were many citizens of other countries who were living in
the U.S. at the time of the attack. Dead and Missing, New York Times,
January 8, 2002.

use murder to advance its objectives:
In addition to the murders of September 11, members of radical Islamicist organizations
are apparently responsible for: the April 18, 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut,
killing 63 persons and injuring 120; the October 23, 1983 bombings of U.S. Marine and
French paratroop barracks in Beirut, killing 300 persons; the December 21, 1988 bombing of
U.S. Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 persons; the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center in New York City, killing six persons and injuring 1000; the June 25, 1996
bombing outside the Khobar Towers U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing
19 U.S. soldiers and wounding 515; the August 7, 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in
Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 persons and injuring more than
5,000; and the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, killing 17
U.S. sailors and wounding 39. This list is incomplete. (See Significant Terrorist
Incidents, 1961-2001 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public
Affairs, October 31, 2001). In addition, members of organizations comprising this movement
are also responsible for numerous failed attempts at mass murder, both in the U.S. and in
other countries, including the attempt to bomb the United Nations and the Lincoln and
Holland Tunnels in New York in 1993 and the attempt to bomb the Los Angeles International
Airport on New Years Eve 2000.

struggle in the path of God (i.e.,
jihad)
forbids: The relationship between the jihad and just war traditions is complex.
Premodern jihad and just war perspectives overlapped in important ways. Both could
legitimate wars aimed at advancing religion, and both sought clearly to disassociate such
wars from wars involving indiscriminate or disproportionate tactics. In the modern era, jihad
has largely retained its confessional component  that is, its aim of protecting and
propagating Islam as a religion. The confessional dimension of jihad thinking in
turn seems to be closely linked to the view of the state widely held by Muslim authorities
 a view that envisions little or no separation of religion from the state. By
contrast, modern Christian thinking on just war has tended to downplay its confessional
elements (few Christian theologians today emphasize the value of crusade),
replacing them with more religiously neutral arguments about human rights and shared moral
norms, or what some Christian and other thinkers term natural moral law. Some
Muslim scholars today seek, in the case of jihad, more fully to recover the sense
of the term as exertion or striving for good in the service of
God, thereby similarly downplaying its confessional elements and emphasizing, for our
increasingly plural and interdependent world, the terms more universal dimensions
and applications. For example, see Sohail M. Hashmi, Interpreting the Islamic Ethics
of War and Peace, in Terry Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious
and SecularPerspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996),
146-166; and Hilmi Zawati, Is Jihad a Just War? War, Peace, and Human Rights under
Islamic and Public International Law (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2001).

Muslim scholars...remind us forcefully:
For example, Muslim scholars affiliated with the Muslim World League, meeting in
Mecca, recently reaffirmed that jihad strictly prohibits the killing
of noncombatants and attacks against installations, sites and buildings not
related to the fighting. See Muslim scholars define terrorism as
opposed to legitimate jihad, Middle East News Online
[www.middleeastwire.com], posted
January 14, 2002. See also Bassam Tibi, War and Peace in Islam, in Terry
Nardin (ed.), The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 128-145.

devastation on its intended targets:
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his study of the 20th century, published in 1995, warns us
in particular, as we confront the new millennium, of the emerging crisis of
non-state terrorism, made possible by the growing privatization of the
means of destruction, such that organized groups, operating at least to some degree
independently of public authorities, are increasingly willing and able to perpetrate
violence and wreckage anywhere on the globe. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of
Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 560.

Conclusion

but friends.We must not be
enemies: From Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 1861.